Syria: Madaya

Jo Cox Excerpts

Monday 11th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jo Cox (Batley and Spen) (Lab)]

(Urgent Question:) To ask the Secretary of State to make a statement on the current situation in Madaya and other besieged communities in Syria.

[The Secretary of State for International Development (Justine Greening)]

Thank you for your kind words, Mr Speaker, which are appreciated. I am very grateful to you, and to the hon. Member for Batley and Spen (Jo Cox), for the chance to discuss this important matter here in the House today.

No one who has seen the pictures coming out of Madaya over recent days can say this this atrocious situation is anything other than utterly appalling. The situation is deliberate and man-made. The Assad regime has besieged the town since July, causing horrific suffering and starvation. I should remind the House that the UK has been at the forefront of global efforts to help ensure, from day one, that people suffering inside Syria have been helped over the past four years.

I would like to update the House specifically on what is happening now. The House will be aware that there are reports that a humanitarian convoy is delivering enough food to all those in Madaya for the next month. In fact, the aid on this convoy is UK funded. We have allocated about £560 million to help people inside Syria. That is partly delivered out of Damascus, which is about 40 km from Madaya, with the consent of the regime, as well as across borders from neighbouring countries, without regime consent. This sits alongside all the work that we are doing to help Syrian refugees across the region and outside Syria. Our overall response of just over £1.1 billion for Syria and the region is our largest ever response to a single humanitarian crisis, and it makes us the second largest donor after the US.

We have lobbied hard for UN Security Council resolutions 2165 and 2191, which has now been superseded by resolution 2258, enabling the UN to deliver aid across borders without the consent of the regime. That is absolutely pivotal for us in order to be able to get to the people we need to get to. We have to remember—this is a very important point for the House—that the people of Madaya are not alone in facing these horrors. In fact, they represent just 10% of those people in besieged areas and just 1% of those living in so-called hard-to-reach areas in Syria. About 400,000 people now live in besieged areas like Madaya, and about 4.5 million in total live in hard-to-reach areas across Syria.

Across Syria, Assad and other parties to the conflict are wilfully impeding humanitarian access on a day-by-day basis. It is an outrageous, unacceptable and illegal mechanism to use starvation as a weapon of war. The most effective way to get food to people who are starving and to stop these needless and horrific deaths is for Assad and all parties to the conflict to adhere to international humanitarian law, so right now I call on the Assad regime and all parties to the conflict to allow immediate and unfettered access to all areas of Syria, not just Madaya.

We will not stop in our fight, whether it be through hard work on a political solution that will deal with the root cause of the problem or through our humanitarian efforts, which provide immediate, life-saving relief. This shocking situation underlines the vital work of aid agencies and shows how important it is that they can have the assurance of knowing that they have the resources to keep going. It also underlines the importance of next month’s Syria conference in London, which we will co-host. I look forward to further questions from Members.

[Jo Cox]

I thank the Secretary of State for her response. I am sure she will agree with the following quote:

“In order to break the siege, you need to first break the silence surrounding it.”

Those words were spoken by an individual in Yarmouk—a camp in Syria’s capital, Damascus—which was besieged for two years by the Syrian Government, causing a reported 200 people to die of hunger. It should not have taken an international outcry on this scale to agree what is a nominal agreement on access to just one small community of 40,000 people out of up to a potential 1 million currently living under siege in Syria.

As we know all too well, it is the Assad regime that is primarily responsible for the policy of sustained, systematic starvation of the population of Syria. Of the areas under siege, 52 are under Assad control, two under rebel control and one under ISIS, so let us be clear: he is responsible for 99% of those areas under siege.

I would be honoured if the Secretary of State could reply to a few questions. First, UN Security Resolution 2165 states that

“United Nations humanitarian agencies and their implementing partners are authorized to use routes across conflict lines”.

Does she agree that, to date, the UN has not pushed the envelope and used that clear authorisation to break the siege not just in Madaya, but country-wide?

Secondly, will the Secretary of State demand answers from the UN on why it is still waiting for permission from Assad when resolution after resolution states that that is not necessary? It has the authority and the mandate to go in right now. Thirdly, will the Secretary of State ask the head of the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs why certain besieged areas are not yet classified as such? For example, why is even Madaya not classified as besieged in the latest OCHA report to the Security Council?

Fourthly, does the Secretary of State agree with me, Médecins sans Frontières and other aid agencies that one-shot distribution to Madaya and other places will not alleviate the problem in the months to come or deal with the wider issue country-wide? Sustained and ongoing access is needed. What measures will the Government take from today to make sure that that pressure is maintained?

Fifthly, does the Secretary of State agree that, as the second largest donor, we have a critical role to play in making sure not just that next month’s donor conference is successful in raising the significant amount of money needed, but that that aid actually reaches Syrian children? We play a welcome role as the second biggest donor to the country, and it is critical to get access.

Finally, does the Secretary of State agree that, if the UN fails to negotiate and agree sustained, ongoing access to those populations under siege, we should start contingency planning for RAF food drops? It has worked before—we have seen it happen. I was an aid worker for more than a decade and I have seen the difference that airdrops can make. Will she investigate whether that is a viable option at this time?

[Justine Greening]

I thank the hon. Lady for her questions. I underline that all parties to the conflict, including Assad, are besieging various parts of the country, so I condemn all of them.

The hon. Lady mentioned OCHA, which is the UN relief organisation that co-ordinates the overall response of UN agencies on the ground in such situations. I spoke to Stephen O’Brien earlier today to go through the latest UN assessment of the situation on the ground. At that stage, the aid convoy had reached the town lines, as it were, but had not passed the border of the town. There are some reports that the aid convoy has now gone into the town.

As much as anything else, the challenge on the ground is to have a viable UN operation that can be carried out safely. In fact, 42 UN aid workers and people delivering aid on its behalf have already lost their lives in the Syria effort, and 40-plus aid workers and UN workers have lost their lives delivering humanitarian aid in Yemen since mid-December. The reality is that we need some sort of agreement on the ground, because if we do not, it will simply be unsafe to deliver aid. Indeed, if there is no agreement with warring parties on the ground—incidentally, such an agreement is part of international guidelines in this area—there is a real danger that the aid will end up in the hands of the very people who are causing the misery in the first place.

I assure the hon. Lady that everyone working on the crisis—I have been involved with it for some time—has no thought in mind other than to get aid to all the people who are desperately in need. That is why we condemn utterly the fact that international humanitarian law is routinely being broken. We often have challenges in reworking aid access when territory switches from one military group to another, and we have to work through such difficulties on the ground every day. It is important to take safety into account, because if we do not, there is a real danger that any system to deliver aid within Syria and similar countries will break down entirely.

I can assure the hon. Lady that there are such discussions. I have regularly and routinely pushed UN agencies on their need to remain impartial, but not to get into unnecessary and inappropriate negotiations, if I may call them that, with the regime. They should not have to make choices about where they deliver aid; aid should go to where it is needed. I and the UK Government, through me or through officials, reiterate that point virtually daily. The UN system agrees with that, but we also need to make sure that UN workers are safe.

The issue of how to protect people caught up in this crisis will be at the heart of the forthcoming conference. That will sit alongside two other strands: one is to have a pledging conference to make sure that UN agencies and non-governmental organisations can get the significant resourcing they need to deliver aid on the ground; and the second is about education and the kind of jobs needed for the people caught up in the crisis, so that remaining close to home in the region is a viable option for them.

The hon. Lady highlighted the children caught up in this crisis. If there is a face of this crisis, it is one of a child. If we look at the people who are left in Madaya, we can see that they are predominantly women and children, which is why the situation unfolding there is so dreadful. As she pointed out, that situation is one of many in Syria right now that, all too often, are happening away from the cameras.

The hon. Lady was right to raise the issue of ongoing access. Frankly, the transparency of the media reporting about Madaya and the profile that the town has received have helped to ensure that the regime felt it needed to provide access. I condemn the fact that it takes the BBC, Reuters and other news agencies to have to report what is going on there for the regime to respond. Such an approach is outrageous, unacceptable and illegal.

There are many things in this world—including at the UN Security Council, which I had the privilege of chairing in November—on which we cannot agree. Finding a long-term peaceful resolution to the Syria crisis will obviously be complex and require significant diplomatic effort, but one thing on which we should be able to agree is the need for adherence to international humanitarian law. I assure the House that I will continue to press for that right through this crisis until we find a peaceful resolution in Syria.